So, I’m pretty mortified to be writing this piece, because I usually try very hard not to get too personal in these pages. Yes, I’ve written about my husband and the death of my beloved dog and the house I lost in a real-estate disaster, but even if you’re not the marrying type, have no desire to own property, and are afraid of Labradoodles, love, loss and real estate are all pretty universal. Everyone has loved somebody, fuzzy or otherwise. Everyone lives somewhere.

So writing about a hair-dye disaster is a tough one. It’s hair dye. A hair disaster is not what one thinks of as a universal plight, unless perhaps one crosses over into the realm of the mystic and the transcendental. So please trust me (I offer, darkly), that’s where I’m going.

This is a story about hair. And money. And how they connect with death. Death in the abstract, but mine in particular, which waits for me at the bottom of a bottle of cherry-espresso semi-permanent dye. I offer this story because, as the Zeitgeist might say if it could speak Understatement, gender is a bit of a thing these days. And hair is connected to gender and gender to power and so on and so on . . . .

I am an actor. A female actor, also known as “actress,” a word I don’t normally use, in the name of gender equity; but I will use “actress” here for possibly obvious reasons. I’m a writer too but, like most writers, I pay an “I love my job” tax, so acting for film and TV was once my sort of day job, one I learned as a child on the streets of Toronto—or rather, playing a child on the streets of Toronto.

My hair started turning grey when I was 27, a fact I concealed for nearly 20 years. Then, on a bleak November day in 2014, I pulled on a toque, slipped out of a Toronto salon as my lowlights cured in their little foil flaps, and crossed Queen Street to buy a birthday present for a friend. I didn’t ask permission because the stylists were all super-busy, plus I am an adult. But my passive-aggressive colourist was so pissed at me when I returned that she let the colour stew on my head for an extra 12 minutes. And so it was that on that day a hazardous lack of experience and a chemical cocktail a hundred ingredients thick changed the shape of my life.

Karen HinesCourtesy Karen Hines /
Swerve

The trendy salon (let’s call it Scissor Kicks) used a colour system made by a large cosmetics corporation (let’s call it Whoops!). They didn’t patch-test my arm for allergies because, well, I don’t know any salon that does, seeing as a patch test takes 48 hours. Even if they had offered, I would have said, “Naw, I’ve been dying my hair for 20 years without a hitch,” and, in this, I would have been like every other woman I know who dyes.

If that day were a horror film, the camera would have tracked with me as I returned from my Queen Street stroll, dollied in on the salon-grade bottles of Whoops!, then zoomed in on the fine print no one ever reads. As I pulled off my toque, the camera would have slowly tilted up to the Chernobyl sizzling under the plastic on my head. When the malign little colourist said, “Oh, you’re back. Here’s a Vanity Fair. I just have to finish Jenny’s bangs,” the audience (conveniently filled with hair-dye victims) would have screamed, “Nooooo! Get it off!!! Those highlights have already been on 30 minutes, which is the max!!! Also, you have dyed your hair for 20 years which statistically means you are likely to have developed an allergic sensitivity to the chemical ingredients!!! Get it offfff!!!”

Cut to close-up of ears burning at the end of prolonged salon session.

Cut to ultrasound of sub-dermal hives forming by the end of friend’s birthday dinner.

Cut to a cafe the next day: ex-boyfriend says, “I feel like I can actually see your forehead getting puffier every few minut—whoa!”

Cut to me waking up the next morning with eyes swollen shut, prying them open just wide enough to get to a walk-in clinic. Doctor prescribes an antihistamine—even as she tells me no antihistamine will stop what is about to overtake me. I tell her I’m an actor. She says, “They still won’t work.”

She tells me I must never dye again or I could die. I say that’s insane and I need to get on a plane. I walk directly into the door jam. She offers to shoot me full of steroids and possibly ruin a liver. “A liver.” She’s messing with me. And is the first person of many who will exhibit no sympathy for me on this, my Hair Dye Journey.

Cut to me at the airport, trying to explain to the gate attendant why I don’t look like my oddly flattering passport photo. The gate attendant tells me I shouldn’t fly in case of anaphylaxis. I tell him I have to get home. I’ll be needing my husband to cook for me soon and maybe even feed me as, apparently, this is going to get worse before it gets better.

The flight attendant seats me in business class because she wants to make sure I’m near the EpiPens, but refuses to serve me any free drinks, which seems cruel. Before takeoff, I chat with my neighbour, who is a cowboy, and appears to think I am one of those little old women who looks like a child: my face is plumped up like a baby’s, but my hair is over-processed and too dark for my face. Plus, I can’t figure out where to plug in my earphones. Four hours later, I turn to say good-bye to the dude. He gasps. Actually gasps. My forehead and cheeks have burgeoned, which I don’t fully clock until I hit the YYC ladies room, where I get those, “Look! An elephantiasis lady!” glances. Moms whispering to little kids not to stare. Then I see “her” in the mirror. Rather, I think there is no mirror in the mirror; that I am looking across my sink at some old-baby-lady who, amazingly, has the same smart toque as mine.

I think my husband may be the kindest man in the world and when he picks me up at the airport, he looks at me without flinching and buries me in his chest. Wraps his big parka arms around me and holds me tight. Ouch, I say, because by this point the skin is stretched so tight across my face it’s like an overripe plum about to split open. He doesn’t let go right away and I don’t push it: I realize he may need this moment to stare up at the sky and deal with the visceral impact of seeing someone he knows—sleeps with—disfigured, while wondering how to ask if it’s permanent.

• • • • •

This story relates to the current Weinstein Moment perhaps only as Mercury relates to the sun. The villains are a cosmetics megacorp and an 18-year-old colour technician. But they all occupy the same galaxy, so maybe think of this tale as one of those cardboard pinhole cameras that allows you to see the sun during an eclipse: reliably, but at a safe remove.

The purpose of my Toronto visit that fall was to rustle up some acting work. I had lived in Toronto most of my life, then in 2009, after 10 years of long-distance romance/stress, I moved west to be with my beau, a.k.a. Parka Man. But though I had fashioned an artistic career in Calgary, my connections as an actress remained in the east. As did my agent.

My agent scares me. Think Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl. Or Alien. She has Canadians in Hollywood, and won’t represent me for theatre because, as she dryly puts it, “Why would I work for 15 per cent of 15 per cent?” (Her theatre-to-film ratio is pretty bang on.) I don’t fire her out of loyalty—we’ve had some good runs—but as I sit in her office on that fateful November junket, patting her German shepherd who growls every time I stop, I wonder why she hasn’t fired me. I present her with a pile of my new Calgary headshots that feature a real cow skeleton in the background, and she asks if I’m joking. The question is rhetorical. She books me with her photographer (who texts on break while in session with Molly Parker). “And get your hair done,” she says, waving her hand around my Molly Parker wannabe ‘do. “I don’t know what this is.”

In the Industry, actors have what is known as their “hit.” Actors don’t discuss it much; we prefer to think about how we might advance things. But there is an ex-casting director in Toronto who teaches an on-camera acting class that starts with him walking around, pointing at actors and telling them their hit: fireman/cop hungry for redemption, accomplished nurse a.k.a. secret killer, sex-crazed mistress with an entrepreneurial side. He’s the Anthony Bourdain of casting.

It’s identity politics in reverse: not how you identify, but how you are identified. Film and TV are, of course, visual media, and though Hollywood is just over 100 years old, it’s like a Cronenberg worm that has laid eggs in North America’s brain. The effects are visceral, inexorable, and though the worm is constantly being dissected, it persists. We all understand the codes, but even as we resist them they hold us in their thrall.

The Industry, meanwhile, is like an ancient computer with too many programs open as it lurches through This Moment wherein it must grapple with systemic, age-old and sometimes horrific failures around sexism, racism, and every other objectification opportunity imaginable. At the far end of the continuum from the monstrous to the mundane, the headshot remains one of the actor’s most essential tools. It’s the calling card. An actor’s objectifiable co-ordinates laid out. Not who you are, but who you look like you are.

When my agent booked my shoot, she offered to get me in with her excellent but high-priced colour technician. You get what you pay for, and I should have said yes. Unfortunately, I didn’t yet know that my slightly down-market option was not so much a colourist as the Grim Reaper himself, in winsome Hogtown drag.

• • • • •

While my husband never actually feeds me by hand that December, he does do all the cooking, shopping and cleaning. My face endures the limits of turgidity until, as though my body knows my head will split open if something doesn’t give, the reaction switches gears, and a poison ivy-like rash runs down my neck, arms, torso and legs, stopping just north of my toes. I imagine that the histamines coursing through the layers of my flesh are jealous of my human form and are demonstrating both their power in reserve and a kind of mercy. This is finite, they seem to be saying. It could have been worse.

I lie on the couch for days, my hands in cotton gloves so I won’t claw my thighs to the bone. Those who have had a similar reaction know that you become like an animal and just go inside. I have lots of time to think about the professional implications of all this. Instead, I place my grateful consciousness inside my healthy organs and thank the gods my lungs don’t itch. My husband refuses to bring me a bottle of gin, but he does bring me bottles of Benadryl, and I rise from the sofa, a Eugene O’Neill character drifting around in summer nighties, jug o’ syrup in hand, staring at that puffy lady in the mirror, wondering when she’s going to leave.

You can only take antihistamines for so long without growing resistant, and right when Johnson & Johnson’s kite begins to fail me, I see it. Deep down at the base of my dark curls: a distinct stripe of grey.

If that moment were a David Lynch movie, a mini-drone would swoop in and chase a miniscule figure through the forest of my two-tone tresses. The tiny man in hooded cape with scythe would spin around to face the camera, reveal his abyss-for-a-head and hiss: “I’ve got you.”

• • • • •

You may have guessed by now that I have no interest in writing a piece about going grey and how “great” it is. I mean no offense to those who have written such pieces; I think they’re important. And I have a dozen friends who’ve gone salt and pepper or arctic white and they’re gorgeous and I’m gorgeous and we’re all gorgeous, blah-dedy blah—oh, and we’re not invisible. We’re actually not. These friends of mine are talented, successful, even powerful.

As a writer, I don’t care about being grey. Aesthetically, I even like it—my new hair is the colour of silvery winter branches, which, unlike mean-salon-girl-black, is flattering to my skin tone.

But I am my own patron.

People tell me I’m brave. They have “mad respect” for me for “going for it.” They presume I chose to go grey. Like I chose my ankle boots or my MO851 scarf. Like I’m some groundbreaking feminista paving the way for younger women, taking objectification itself and shaking it by the scruff, throwing it down and putting a knee to its throat.

I mentor my young friends in many ways, but going grey isn’t one of them.

It’s not like I made my way through the world on my hottie looks to begin with. It helped that I wasn’t hideous, and being vaguely ethnic (as I was categorized) allowed me to slip in and out of many various contexts. But to really frame it, buddy Bourdain’s “hit” for me when I was 23 was “academic, single, daddy’s girl.” I was none of those things at the time, but my hair was in a bob, which apparently ruled out girlfriend roles. As did being petite with, shall we say, petite legs and breasts.

That casting director was right. I have almost never been cast as the girlfriend, the wife, the mother, i.e. someone a man might sleep with. My component parts don’t “code sexy.” Which bothers me far less than you might think.

My bread-and-butter roles were the (non-flirtatious) assistant, the campaign manager, the publicist, the health-care worker. Anything involving a clipboard. I was good at acting with celebrities without getting nervous, telling Robin Williams, “The polls are closed, Tom.” Looking into Christopher Walken’s wild eyes and saying, “The bus is leaving.” Valuable skills in the heyday of Toronto-for-Boston flicks, and I never saw a casting couch because if there was a male gaze at play, it wasn’t on me.

I did have a brilliant decade working with Ken Finkleman in choice cameos he wrote for me, inspired by what he intuited was my disdain for him. I stepped in for an actor on The Newsroom when young buddy landed a Hollywood gig. The role, “Jeremy,” had zero to do with being female. He was renamed “Karen,” and for three seasons, I played a linchpin in a show that critiqued the self-serving politics of an institution much like the CBC. The cast riffed relentlessly in scenes that were satirizations of moments startlingly adjacent to the Moment we find ourselves in now, and took the piss out of the industry. Through the power of parody, I was unbound by what you might call Weinstein’s Theory of Relativity: I was never described by my features; Finkleman simply painted “my character” as “argumentative.”

Until grey.

Because let’s face it, how many grey-haired actresses do we know who aren’t Helen Mirren or Glenn Close? What was the last major role Jamie Lee Curtis played? Someone amazing and tall. Because her cheekbones code amazing and her height codes power. As Calgary casting director Rhonda Fisekci concedes, if a female character is described as grey-haired, it’s because her character embodies wisdom and authority. “Like a judge.” When I press her, she agrees that “mad lady/witch” might be on the same map. Also, “wise nanna.” Familiar characters, but there aren’t a lot of them in Netflix land. And when you take grey hair and blend it, in my case, with pixie-like dimensions, Betty Boop cheeks and part-chipmunk voice, I think we can all agree to draw a blank.

Rare is the actress gone grey under 60. If she goes, she’s usually tall and has great bones that code authority. And she’s often game to dye again for a role, which, in my case, would likely find me dead.

Who am I now? This isn’t just about age. On camera, I had always looked younger than my years. Now, at 50, as I expand in life experience and clarity, my hit is like a radio station that won’t come in. My co-ordinates are “limiting,” Fisekci concedes, even as she compliments my silvery ‘do.

• • • • •

December 2014, the swelling and rashes subside. I start shedding. I’m like a snow crane, one of those cranes over a movie set that makes snow. My body is the crane. My outbox that December sports a combination of apologies for missed deadlines and horror-selfies sent to unsuspecting pals in my Benadryl-fuelled indignation.

January, I spend time on the phone with the head of Whoops! Customer Care, an elegant German man, and with the Dutch Whoops! doctor. (Though these allergic reactions are “rare,” they are common enough to warrant a full-time doctor on staff.) She, a representative of the Whoops! megacorp, confirms that if I ever dye again I could die.

The conversations are careful. Cold. I answer questions about my work, my insurance or lack thereof, how this may impact my livelihood in the future. The elephant in the room is a settlement. English is everybody’s second language, they being European-born, me speaking Benadrese.

In my pyjamas, I go to an allergist. The prime culprit is Toluene-2,4-diisocyanate, an adhesive known to be deadly in concentrated doses and which operates as a fixer in dyes, responsible for gluing the colour to the shaft as well as all kinds of other craziness. Another probable culprit is paraphenylenediamine or PPD, which something like 1.5 per cent of the population is allergic to, according to the many incomprehensible and contradictory sites I enthusiastically urge you to visit so that I’m not the only one going, WTF?

I will not name the cosmetics corporation that supplied the trendy salon because they would doubtless sue me. But it doesn’t matter, because they’re all the same: same warnings, same ingredients. And so that you know, many of the component parts are “natural.” The Whoops! reps almost never say “PPD” or “cyanate,” as though they might soil their own mouths. But those ingredients are both as ubiquitous as weather and natural as blowfish.

Cannily, the general population avoids smearing blowfish blubber on our heads.

So products described as “natural” and “gentle” can be just as toxic as the rest. Semi-permanent dyes carry primary allergens just like permanents, perhaps one chemical to the left, as the Whoops! doctor elusively puts it. When she tells me that my reaction is “not severe,” my blood runs cold. Then she allows that the extreme end of the spectrum I’m on includes death, and I am now in my own private Chinatown.

While the Whoops! doctor asks me endless questions that I can only imagine are for her research, I ask her endless questions and tell her I will write this piece one day. There is a conference call: me, the German customer care rep and the doctor. If it were a John Grisham thriller, there would be a three-way split screen: the doctor in her Copenhagen laboratory; the customer care guy, pensive on the River Spree; me in gossamer nightie, surrounded by swirling petals of skin.

Me: You’re saying this is not severe?

Doctor: You’re not hooked up to life support.

The shots would widen: a team of operatives in the lab listening in to the conversation; a sniper on my neighbour’s roof.

Me: You mean . . . “not yet . . . ”

• • • • •

I am often asked why I don’t sue. For starters, I don’t have the appetite or the budget for corporate lawsuits. Suing Scissor Kicks is a non-starter because I’m not about to ruin a slack teenager’s life. And really, my face did return to its original size and shape within six weeks—minus a couple layers of skin, which gave me a youthful glow. The abstract loss of future income for an actress circling 50? (Echo . . . echo . . . echo…. )

For a year, I wear hats. When the grey grows long enough, I get an expensive cut. I text a selfie to my agent. She texts back, “A pixie should never get a pixie cut.” We continue on tenterhooks.

Sans headshot, I audition for a judge. I am told she’s a “battleaxe.” I’m 5-1. I say, “I can offer you ‘small seething person.’” The director isn’t interested. I go for “battleaxe” and pull out a performance like when your little niece pretends to be Vin Diesel.

I dive into writing. The singular focus is fruitful, though I often find myself in the aisles of Shoppers Drug Mart running my fingers over the new Walnut Fusion with Cambrian Sheen. Surely it was a freak incident? That kid just left the dye on too long. From the corner of my eye I see the Grim Reaper checking out the Grecian Formula. I make an appointment with my GP, who suggests that if I want to try dying again, I should plan to do it in the ER.

Sans headshot, I audition for an indie film. An indie director has seen me in an indie short at an indie festival. He and all his associates are males, 30-ish, and though he has invited me because of my “mad skills,” the second they see my head the oxygen leaves the room. He hasn’t seen me grey. I make a joke about wearing a gallery owner wig, because the role is for a “Gallery Owner, 35-50.” I’m not sure whether they don’t laugh because they have no sense of humour, because I’m not funny, or because we all know wigs usually look wiggy and only Scarlett Johansson has a team big enough to hide the weaves and pins. These young men don’t know how to riff with a woman who is grey because even if they never would have slept with her before, the Reaper is now waving his scythe from the monitor they’re all staring at. The gallery owner is, according to the casting breakdown, “dating.” To these young men, I imagine sleeping with a true grey might seem like sleeping with death itself. And not in a sex-and-death way, just . . . death.

“Oh my god, we’re all going to die!” says my high school friend Eveline when she first catches sight of my new hair. It’s a brutally honest, darkly humorous response I appreciate.

The 20-something women who dye their hair grey do it because it looks cool, my mauve-haired niece tells me. I ask her if they aren’t doing it ironically; at some level sending a gentle F.U. to those of us who actually are grey. Doing it because they can and, in so doing, giving death itself the finger. My niece just looks at me. I’m not sure if that’s because she hasn’t thought of it or because she is now thinking of something else.

For those of us making our unintended feminist statements, the millennial grey is a tough one to grok. I do like the highlights and the streaks of green, and I remember being far enough away from aging not to be able to imagine it. I also remember watching The Day After when I was 18 and fearing the future, and those young greys know that generations before them have interfered with theirs. I saw grey roping up out of my scalp that December day. Taking over my head. My life. We’re all gonna die, but I know I’m lucky to have hit 50.

“Death. Deathedy death death,” crows my grey. “Doom, dooby-dooby doom,” croons the Reaper. We’re all going there, I’m just an ad for it, groovy as a mesothelioma class-action-suit commercial. I’m not counting on any acting work, but I did get new headshots because, as it turns out, my scary agent is loyal, too. She wants to get me whatever non-existent roles she can.

So I have new photos and a new hit. Not sure what it is. The photos are pro, but my hair is decidedly grey. Precisely one shade of grey, and there’s nothing I can do about that: I dye, I die. I don’t quite code “nanna,” and will never be tall enough for “chief surgeon” (can’t reach without a footstool), and even though my new hair has shot me 20 years up the age scale, my face codes—relentlessly— “impish.” So assistant roles are now just the sad ones: the person who didn’t “get her intentionality together in time for a real career.” Unless she is secretly an elf. Not sure I want to rock either of those. Parisian literary agent? Eveline suggests, “co-artistic director of a Gulf Island arts festival.” Sexy.

My husband has been terribly sweet through it all and continues to be just as delighted with me as before, maybe even more so, seeing as he went grey 15 years ago. His new nickname for me is “the Small Grey,” this inspired by his research on the alien-abductee community and their fear of Tall Greys.

So maybe an alien.

Then there’s the Invisible Woman hit. An accidental superhero who says “I feel invisible!” one too many times, and so now, Whoops! she actually is invisible. But endowed with alien powers. She is pressed into a kind of global service whereby she slips into the Oval Office and whispers into minds, sneaks into homes and rescues animals and children, steals aboard helicopters and parachutes down into the forests and cities, putting out fires before they begin.

I need to take a meeting. Make a pitch. Invisible Woman. Small, grey, bitter but fair, infinitely powerful . . . .

When the Kirkland family, who lived in a townhome in southwest Airdrie, decided they were ready for a home with a private yard and more square footage, their boxes of belongings didn’t need to travel far.